People Accused of Witchcraft - Humanity in its most Animalistic Behavior

People Accused of Witchcraft

Humanity in its most Animalistic Behavior

Warning: The following footage is extremely graphic and may be disturbing to some viewers

People Accused of WitchcraftHumanity in its most Animalistic Behavior

The following footage is videos showing people being accused of witchcraft. In this footage we take you to Nyamataro Village in Africa. Humanity in its most animalistic behavior. These people are accused of carrying charms.

Historically, it was widely believed that
witchcraft involved the use of these powers to inflict harm upon members
of a community or their property.

Since the mid 20th century, the term witchcraft has sometimes been used
to distinguish between bad witchcraft and good witchcraft, with the
latter often involving healing.

The concept of witchcraft as harmful is normally treated as a cultural
ideology, a means of explaining human misfortune by blaming it either on
a supernatural entity or a known person in the community.

Africans have a wide range of views of traditional religions. African
Christians typically accept Christian dogma as do their counterparts in
Latin America and Asia.

The term witch doctor, often attributed to Zulu
inyanga, has been misconstrued to mean "a healer who uses witchcraft"
rather than its original meaning of "one who diagnoses and cures
maladies caused by witches".

Combining Roman Catholic beliefs and practices and traditional West
African religious beliefs and practices, particularly West African
Vodun, are several syncretic religions in the Americas, including Vodou,
Obeah, Candomblé, Quimbanda and Santería.

In Southern African
traditions, there are three classifications of somebody who uses magic.

The thakathi is usually improperly translated into English as "witch",
and is a spiteful person who operates in secret to harm others.

The
sangoma is a diviner, somewhere on a par with a fortune teller, and is
employed in detecting illness, predicting a person's future (or advising
them on which path to take), or identifying the guilty party in a
crime. She also practices some degree of medicine.

The inyanga is often translated as "witch doctor" (though many Southern
Africans resent this implication, as it perpetuates the mistaken belief
that a "witch doctor" is in some sense a practitioner of malicious
magic).

The inyanga's job is to heal illness and injury and provide
customers with magical items for everyday use.

Of these three
categories the thakatha is almost exclusively female, the sangoma is
usually female, and the inyanga is almost exclusively male.

In some
Central African areas, malicious magic users are believed by locals to
be the source of terminal illness such as AIDS and cancer. In such
cases, various methods are used to rid the person from the bewitching
spirit, occasionally Physical abuse and Psychological abuse.

Witchcraft is the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic.

Although defined differently in disparate historical and cultural contexts, witchcraft has often been seen, especially in the West, as the work of crones who meet secretly at night, indulge in cannibalism and orgiastic rites with the Devil, and perform black magic.

Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world.

Witchcraft and Children

According to reports of the Los Angeles Times via Associated Press, thousands of African children have been tortured and murdered in the name of Christianity because they were thought to be witches.

The burning and murdering of “witches” is something that was thought to have died out in the 17th century with the Salem witch trials but it is still a reality in some places around the world, especially in Africa where Evangelicalism has been on the rise.

Children have not only been victimized by believers in witchcraft, they are also used as witch-finders. In these cultures, infants are also believed to be targets by witches and eaten by some at witches' Sabbats.

In addition to the varying roles children played in witchcraft accusations and trials, these roles varied by location. Punishments were meted out to various degrees depending upon the culture and continent.

Children Accused of WitchcraftInternews has produced two videos to raise awareness of
the plight of Congolese children accused of witchcraft. The videos were
part of a project funded by the United States Agency for International
Development that trained journalists from Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC) to report on peace talks and social issues. The videos were
produced by Angela Nicoara and Mike Ormsby.Children may be accused of being witches, for example a young niece may be blamed for the illness of a relative. Most of these cases of abuse go unreported since the members of the society that witness such abuse are too afraid of being accused of being accomplices.

It is also believed that witchcraft can be transmitted to children by feeding. Parents discourage their children from interacting with people believed to be witches.

As of 2006, between 25,000 and 50,000 children in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been accused of witchcraft and thrown out of their homes.

On April, 2008, Kinshasa, the police arrested 14 suspected victims (of penis snatching) and sorcerers accused of using black magic or witchcraft to steal (make disappear) or shrink men's penises to extort cash for cure, amid a wave of panic. Arrests were made in an effort to avoid bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 alleged penis snatchers were beaten to death by mobs.

It was reported on May 21, 2008 that in Kenya a mob had burnt to death at least 11 people accused of witchcraft. In Tanzania in 2008, President Kikwete publicly condemned witchdoctors for killing albinos for their body parts which are thought to bring good luck. 25 albinos have been murdered since March 2007.

In the Meatu district of Tanzania, half of all murders are “witch-killings”. In the Nigerian states of Akwa Ibom and Cross River about 15,000 children branded as witches and most of them end up abandoned and abused on the streets. In Gambia, about 1,000 people accused of being witches were locked in detention centers in March 2009 and forced to drink a dangerous hallucinogenic potion, human rights organization Amnesty International said.

Every year, hundreds of people in the Central African Republic are convicted of witchcraft.

Christian pastors in Nigeria have been involved in the torturing and killing of children accused of witchcraft. Over the past decade, over 1000 children have been murdered with some being set on fire. Church pastors, in an effort to distinguish from the competition, establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft. When repeatedly asked to comment about the matter, the Church has refused to comment.